Abstract
A novel hydrocyclone including a cylindrical screen embedded in a conventional hydrocyclone (CH), named three products hydrocyclone screen (TPHS), has been successfully designed. In TPHS, the combination of centrifugal classification and screening was employed to separate particles. In this paper, Grey theory, as an effective means to the laws of both complex and uncertainty system’s behavior with small samples, was used to investigate the operational (feed concentration and feed pressure) and structural (aperture size, spigot diameter, and vortex finder diameter) parameters on performance evaluation Hancock classification efficiency (HE), imperfection (I), and cut size (d50c). The experiments of coal sample (0–1 mm) show that TPHS with coarser particles in underflow exhibited the absent “fish-hook”. The closeness calculated using the Grey System algorithm indicates that the performance of TPHS was closely related to the operation and structure parameters. Further, the order of grey incidence degree between different parameters and HE (or I or d50c) is the spigot diameter and aperture size with the highest value, the feed pressure and vortex finder diameter with the middle value, and the feed concentration with the lowest value. The prediction using the GM(1, N) algorithm implies that the dynamic prediction model for the performance evaluation can be created depending on the operation, structure and previous performance value. The mean relative errors between the predicted and actual HE, I, and d50 were 2.84%, 5.83%, and 3.57%, respectively, which exhibit the accurate prediction.
Highlights
Hydrocyclones are well known as significant devices to separate fine particles based on its size in a centrifugal force field
Prior to the investigation for the effects of operational and structural parameters on the device performance, the separation characteristic of three products hydrocyclone screen (TPHS) was verified compared to previous works
It is apparent that the size distribution of TPHS in each product stream varied with different operational and structural parameters, the overall trends remained similar
Summary
Hydrocyclones are well known as significant devices to separate fine particles based on its size in a centrifugal force field. On the one hand due to the inherent disadvantages (like fish-hook effect or unsatisfactory efficiency [6,7]), on the other hand owing to the new trendies (like the reducing processed particle size [8,9]), the hydrocyclone performance is partly weak, even the device cannot be adopted in some industrial process cases. The device performance is tried to be improved by the structural modifications, such as (1) introducing new structures like filtering hydrocyclone [10,11], JK three-product cyclone [12], and two-inlet hydrocyclones [13,14], and (2) changing original structures including the feed pipe [15], the cylindrical section [16], the vortex finder [17], and the conical vessel [16], among others. The exited computational fluid dynamics simulation and particle image velocimetry test reveal that TPHS, compared to CH, could eliminate the column and short circuit flow for the more reasonable flow field distribution [20]
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